I just finished reading a series that I thought was a bit of an object lesson, both in terms of what I think worked and what I think didn’t, so I decided to break a ten-year streak and actually review some fiction.
The series is Anne Bishop’s The Others, and the biggest thing Bishop does right is playing to her strengths. The series has a lot of the same horror-Romance feel as Bishop’s early work and many of the characters reprise roles that are familiar from her other stories.
Bishop has always had a tendency to push boundaries, and this series is no exception. Meg, the central human character, is a “blood prophet” – a girl who can see visions of the future when her skin is cut or damaged. The gift is potentially deadly; the euphoria that comes with a spoken vision is addictive, and most girls eventually go mad from conflicting visions or die from infected cuts. Men can carry the gene, but only young women are blood prophets. Since cutting can be a serious real-world problem experienced largely by young girls, there’s been some criticism of this presentation in the books.
Problematic magical gifts aside, Meg is a great choice as the focus of the series. She’s been raised in an asylum where her life has been rigidly controlled by handlers who sell her visions to the powerful, so when she escapes at the start of Book 1, she knows very little of the world outside. This makes filling in background information relatively easy for the author – Meg has to have a lot explained to her, so the reader can learn as she does
The romance takes five books to get to the first kiss. Bishop walks a tricky line between not letting the reader forget about the romance in the swirl of politics, murder, and confrontation, and not turning up the heat to the point where the reader starts shouting “Just kiss already!” at the book. For my money, the gradual development works, and given Meg’s horrific background, her abusive upbringing, and her lack of understanding of either of the cultures she has to deal with, it’s entirely believable.
I also enjoyed a lot of the changes Bishop rings on urban fantasy tropes like vampires and were-creatures (not just wolves; we meet were-crows and a were-grizzly, and there are references later to were-sharks and were-orcas), as well as some of her new introductions (though we don’t see much of the elementals or the indescribable Elders).
The conflict between the humans and the Others is likewise intriguing, and Bishop makes the most of it. The plots of all the books revolve around the friction between the Others and the humans who live at their sufferance.
It’s the setup of the whole situation that brought me to a screeching halt.
The Others series is set in an alternate version of Earth in which humans were originally restricted to Europe. The rest of the world is owned and cared for by the Others, insanely powerful predators who see humans as “clever meat.” Nevertheless, the humans managed to develop a mostly-modern technology, with trains, computers, cars, phones, etc. They also colonized the Americas by leasing bits of land from the Others (after their first couple of settlements got eaten). They now have a scattering of smallish cities and hamlets, closely watched by the Others and connected by roads and trains through the “wild country”. The source of most of the conflict in the books comes from implied human population pressure and human demand for more food and resources.
I have some serious problems with this scenario. First off, I don’t find the alternate history plausible, even if the borders of Europe stretch to include North Africa and the Arabian peninsula. (You pretty much have to do that to get a mostly-modern society on a mostly-parallel timeline; an awful lot of important stuff like algebra and astronomy was reintroduced to Europe from Arab countries after the Medieval period.) Too much of modern technological development is the result of cross-fertilization between far-flung civilizations (gunpowder originated in China, for instance, as did a number of other vital inventions like the compass). If those civilizations don’t exist, neither does the knowledge they had or the inventions they made or inspired.
Second, I don’t believe that the humans would spend seriously limited resources building thousands of miles of railroads to link their scattered cities together. Also, massive construction projects through wild country don’t seem feasible when that wilderness is populated by insanely powerful invisible creatures that a) don’t like pristine land being torn up and b) see humans as a nice, easy snack.
Some (though not all) of my objections could have been bypassed if Bishop had chosen not to explain the history of the Others and the humans. Worldbuilding holes are a lot less obvious if the story presents as “This is how the world is; we’re not going to worry about how it got this way.” The present-day interaction between the powerful, predatory Others and the technological humans is interesting and well-done. I just don’t believe it would ever have gotten to this point, especially when the North American Others have been living next to humans and watching them closely for four hundred years as of the start of the story. I also find it odd that the Others have learned practically nothing at all about how human society and culture work after so much time.
Which brings me to my final complaint, which is that most of the humans, particularly the villains, are stupid. What else do you call a bunch of people who would know, if they were paying any attention at all, that the 90% of the continent they don’t occupy is full of beings that they don’t have the power to take down? Beings who could, if sufficiently annoyed, wipe humans off the continent or even the world? What else do you call people who, in spite of being faced with multiple warnings (in the shape of messily dead provocateurs), continue to foment war and unrest?
And in addition to being stupid, the bad guys are all purely evil, with no redeeming qualities or complexity whatsoever. This does make it extremely satisfying to watch them go down, but as the series wears on, the repetition of “Hey, look, there’s a huge man-eating tiger; I will walk over and poke it with my fork, because I’m sure it can’t really hurt me…Oops” gets to be a bit much.
Ultimately, for me, the cons outweigh the pros. What Bishop does with the relationships, both between individuals and between cultures/species, was enough to keep me reading through the five books, but in the end, my suspension of disbelief fails, and I doubt that I’ll keep them on my shelves. However, the series has a sizeable fan base, so clearly the pluses outweigh the minuses for a lot of readers…and that is why I chose to do this review. Because the Others has gotten to six very successful, very popular published novels in spite of its flaws – in fact, I am not at all sure that Anne Bishop could have told these stories without setting the situation up the way she has. If that’s true, the flaws in the worldbuilding are impossible to get rid of. Instead of making a fruitless effort to justify the implausibilities in the backstory, Bishop focused on the strengths that have grown her audience: the characters and relationships, the politics and culture clash. It’s a useful lesson for those writers who insist on perfection in every possible area of their writing.
I stopped reading after the first book, because I found the world-building so annoying. The question of how humans would behave if we were far from being the alpha predators in the world fascinated me, but her human villains in the first book didn’t act like that at all. They completely behaved like stereotypical human villains, sure that they were powerful enough to take on the Others and win. It made no sense. And if I’m remembering it correctly, there was also a lot of “the Others hate all humans, except for this special snowflake of a human,” which I also didn’t like. It was like she had a great idea for an original story that lasted for about four chapters and then she just went back to telling a familiar story instead, with familiar characters. And the were-creatures are so trendy in paranormal romance that it fell flat for me. But I keep seeing the sequels and thinking, well, maybe, because she definitely knows how to tell a story if you can suspend your disbelief enough to enjoy it.
Popularity of a book or series in no way guaranties quality—Dan Brown, David Weber, and Stephenie Meyer (among many others) offering ample proof of that. Indeed, there is strong evidence that popularity and quality are inversely proportional.
I don’t think you can stretch a lack of correlation between popularity and quality into an inverse correlation, particularly when “quality” in fiction is so subjective.
The first (and only) Anne Bishop book I’ve read is “Daughter of the Blood,” and she is one of the few authors that I will never, ever give a second read. Her strengths are evident- it’s an interesting world with a compelling magic system (even if it’s a little nonsensical if you squint, and leans too much into the erotica for my taste), the characters are flawed and dynamic, and she’s got a cool neo-gothic sensibility.
All of her strengths cannot make up for the fact that essentially, the heroes end up winning through sexually abusing a child.
It makes me angry every time I think about that book. I have no idea how any of that plot line made it through the editors, or the beta readers, or even how she managed to put the words down on paper. I know there’s a metaphor for adulthood through sexual awakening, but that argument can bite me because the “young adult” in question is eleven. ELEVEN.
Sorry, long time lurker and this is not necessarily the way I want to participate. I don’t want to make you think about this book. I don’t want to think about this book. But it’s also one of the only reasons I’ve blacklisted an author, and as you can see I still feel strongly about it. The point I’m trying to make is, I guess, feel good about your WIP— because even if it’s not perfect, at least there are no heroic child molesters.
“Daughter of the Blood” has a lot of flaws, which is unsurprising since it was Bishop’s first book. But “heroes winning through sexually abusing a child” is not one of them. The finale of the book is the heroes’ FAILURE to rescue an emotionally abused child before the abuse escalates into the most horribly physical, though their rescue comes just in time to save her life. Not one of the heroes ever has sex, consensual or forced, with an underaged child. The child molesters are all villains, and eventually (in the later books of the series) meet gruesome ends.
That said, the book is one long child-in-jeopardy plotline, which I dislike in general. Combine that with the violence, sex, and violent sex that saturates the world she’s created, and it’s problematic, especially when she names her heroes Saetan, Lucivar, and Daemon. This is part of what I meant about her tending to push boundaries.